I mean, if I link to the.tmp file in C:\Users\AnonCow\appdata\local\microsoft\windows\tempor~1\Low, then copy the linked file somewhere else, and then play that file three years later, without wasting any further bandwidth because Windows is too silly an OS to let me grab an open file handle without a little fuckery, is it really still streaming from Vimeo?

And if I call a little python [github.com] script from the command line with the URL of a YouTube video, is that really streaming?

I guess as long as the server thinks I'm streaming, it counts as streaming.

So, umm, yeah. I stream most of my entertainment content. Yes sirree, just video streams. In one port and out the other, nothin' but ether. (And pay no attention to the ever-decreasing amount of free space on my hard drive...)

I mean, if I link to the.tmp file in C:\Users\AnonCow\appdata\local\microsoft\windows\tempor~1\Low, then copy the linked file somewhere else, and then play that file three years later, without wasting any further bandwidth because Windows is too silly an OS to let me grab an open file handle without a little fuckery, is it really still streaming from Vimeo?

And if I call a little python [github.com] script from the command line with the URL of a YouTube video, is that really streaming?

I guess as long as the server thinks I'm streaming, it counts as streaming.

So, umm, yeah. I stream most of my entertainment content. Yes sirree, just video streams. In one port and out the other, nothin' but ether. (And pay no attention to the ever-decreasing amount of free space on my hard drive...)

The most interesting part of your post is that you actually managed to find something on Youtube that you feel is worth watching more than once.

no what is interesting is that he doesn't clean out his cache more than once every 3 years.

You misunderstand how Vimeo (and YouTube, and many other "streaming" services) work.

In the case of Vimeo, the *.flv video is downloaded, not streamed, and sits on the local hard drive so that the Flash plug-in can play it back. Windows won't let you copy that file as long as Flash has the file open. When you close the browser window, Flash deletes the file.

Unless you create a link to that file, and copy the contents of the link.

UC Davis has a nice collection of symphonies. I listened to their recording of Orff's Carmina Burana at least five times before downloading a permanent copy (mainly so I could listen to just my favorite sections, not the whole thing). They also have a couple other nice symphonies - if you're into music from Bach to Tchaikovsky, they're worth a listen.

They are. But if you're not a complete fool, you'll download them from one of the mirrors: ftp://ftp.ccc.de/congress/2011/mp4-h264-HQ/ [ftp.ccc.de] Because a web browser is as much of a media player as a computer is a TV set on a typewriter.

On a similar note, how does SlingBox count? Or, for that matter, TV shows that offer their content online? For shows that I really want to pay attention to, I prefer to watch from a website, because it's more convenient. I can pause it if I need to get a cup of coffee, etc.. But when I just want something to listen to in the background, I'll turn on the slingbox.

I don't even have cable TV anymore. My 42" plasma screen in the living room is only used for watching DVDs with my girlfriend. I get my news entire

The idiot box is pretty much being relegated to canned entertainment. Maybe a bigger screen 65 inch or more and I would consider cable just for a rotating scenery channel with time/weather popup as long as the screen is fairly energy efficient. Quality scenery channels are a better way to go that fucking up every public beach, every river bank, every lake front, every picturesque valley, every forest, with shitty McMansions and idiot narcissists ruining what they were trying to gain 'exclusivity' over.

Lost my MP3 collection, and Spotify's gotten good enough that I don't really feel the need to download any of it again...

And the fact that Spotify has all my bands is quite amazing, really - I've quite an eclectic taste in music, mostly being into EBM and alternative electronica.

Consider me impressed, to the point that I don't really mind spending $17/month on it (Norwegian pricing) - it even streams to my mobile =) AND includes offline sync to the point where I don't even need mp3s for transatlantic flight

Spotify can call be back when they get AC/DC or Red Hot Chili Peppers. Seriously, the restriction crap bothers the fuck out of me, not to mention that they screwed up half my playlists a year ago when they "cleaned up" their collection. I've started buying vinyl and ripping it instead. (I used to have a free account, until they crippled those.)

You should also be aware that from those $17/month, $16 go directly to the people who invented SOPA/PIPA (the labels). Spotify screws artists even worse than ordin

Really? I'd say 3.2Mbps h.264 (iplayer HD) is not up to scratch compared to 9.7Mbps VBR h.264 for the UK broadcast version, even with the somewhat questionable encoding practices and anamorphic picture (1440x1080). Compared to the Euro broadcast version (from which the Virgin Media stream is derived) at 1920x1080 and a full 16-odd Mbps it's no competition.

Unless you're comparing iplayer HD to regular SDTV, in which case it's a toss-up of whether you prefer a higher resolution picture, or a significant redu

Similar numbers for me, though I stream a little more. I'd say it's about 10% for audio--mostly live music or pre-recorded live music from the Internet Archive. The sound quality offered by most streaming sources doesn't impress me, and my personal library is Ogg Vorbis. For video, though, it's probably closer to 75-80%.

Buy an FM transceiver. You plug your smart phone into it, tune it to an unused FM frequency and set your radio to that frequency. I used one for many years in my old car before I got one with an AUX input.

Internet radio is the best thing that ever happened to music. It'd be interesting to see the rate of decline in music piracy after Pandora came onto the scene. I bet it was responsible for a bigger reduction in piracy than iTunes/Amazon/etc. It's free (or very cheap if you can't stand the ads) and al

I've used one of those transceivers before. The sound quality is pretty bad. Plus, in this city, it's not much of a stretch to say that virtually the entire FM band is occupied. Interference even comes from other cars using one.

I had one of those iPod-to-car-radio FM things. But here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the only way to find an unused spot on the FM band is to drive out behind the mountains, and even then that only works until you go around the next couple of curves and have to retune. Basically, that's when it's time to listen to CDs, or open the window, listen to the wind, and let the monkey mind chatter away undistracted.

My current car radio not only has the aux input jack actually installed, it also has a USB jac

depends on the car as well, my antenna is on the back of the car, my little transmitter is in the front, those 3 feet make tolerable into unusable, and I am not trying to be a snob here, I listen to AM radio quite frequently, and unusable is pretty bad when your comfortable tuning out the sound of peoples HID lights on your radio

Ah, the cassette transducer. It was a sad day when the old radio/cassette player in my Volvo died, and I could no longer play my mp3s. Nowadays, radios with aux-players are pretty cheap, but at the time I had to buy a new radio they didn't even exist. (I can't use FM transmitters because the ignition coil produces too much RF noise.)

No matter if you buy a cd/dvd from the store or watch OTA content from local broadcast stations, somewhere along the way there is a stream of electrons involving a machine that must be on line to process said electrons.

Audio stuff: I listen to mainly obscure stuff that I usually buy online or order in hard copy (from record companies directly whenever possible). So almost no streaming, mainly because it's not available in streaming form. Also I prefer to interact with the media rather than be a passive recipient (skip tracks, rewind, replay, pause, that sort of stuff). Streaming media comes in constantly, if you pause a song because you have to answer the phone, it's not going to be possible to resume 5 minutes later. Whi

Streaming media comes in constantly, if you pause a song because you have to answer the phone, it's not going to be possible to resume 5 minutes later. Which sucks.

No, the streaming clients you've been using suck. I stream KRTU and other online radios using mplayer and if I pause, the cache will just increase until I press play. If you set a big enough cache, it can pause for an hour or more.

It's only inevitable if you stream continually. Since most people have to make long interruptions where pausing wouldn't make sense (e.g. sleeping), it's usually possible to adjust the cache size to let you pause as much as you like.

If you actually stream continuously through the day, you can effectively move your cache to the disk by using a stream recorder like icecream [sourceforge.net]. 1GB should let you pause for about 20 hours. Or buy a 1Tb disk and pause for 2 years;)

See, that's the thing: it becomes overly-complicated and with no advantages whatsoever.

1. The sound quality is worse than locally-available music.2. You don't get to choose the music (which can at times be a good thing, because you might be pleasantly surprised by some unknown songs).3. You are forced to listen through commercials/idiotic DJs/track interruptions/etc (where applicable).4. In some cases you have no way of knowing who's playing, what song, from which album (streaming station doesn't provide in

Last.fm for music, Hulu/$Show's Site for Video. I don't think I've turned on the TV for weeks, and that was only for background music while cleaning since the PC was too far away to hear and the Radio stations around tend to only play pop 20's.

I recently picked up a 2010 Mac Mini at Best Buy for cheap to use as a HTPC and I haven't watched cable since. My wife misses American Idol, but that can be solved with an HD antenna and some PVR software down the road.

The difference in my kids attitudes was amazing. Netflix doesn't have millions of commercials for useless crap that kids don't really need, and that alone was priceless. We have 2 streaming netflix accounts, a hulu plus account, paid pandora. We have not watched OTA or cable TV in a very long time, and don't buy DVDs or Blu-rays anymore, because they keep breaking. The only reason I am not at 100% (I am including downloads as streaming) is because we listen to FM Radio in the car.

Do you play Blu-ray discs on your Debian box as well? I use my Debian box as my file server and Mythbox so I've already got it handling DVDs. I haven't yet upgraded to a Blu-ray drive yet because I didn't think the capability to play the discs was all that good yet. Is it good enough to be useful now?

Obviously, it will probably be awhile before MythTV supports them, but I can always use an external player if one is available that works.

I suppose a better question then is, what is the state of Blu-ray ripping in Linux? Specifically, has enough of the DRM been worked around and/or cracked that I can pop in a disc and rip it to my drive? Presumably it won't be as easy as using something like Handbrake for DVDs.

If I can do this without too many major headaches, then it's probably time to upgrade my optical drive. I never use my physical DVDs either. I just rip them and play off the HDD. No reason not to do th

And why is that? It's not 2005 anymore... a few Australian ISPs offer unlimited plans (TPG, Dodo etc.), or have very high caps (e.g. 1 TB, which is offered by Node, iiNet, Optus, Telstra, TPG...basically all the big players). So although most Australian plans have a cap, at least you have a choice of caps, so you can either get a high one if you need it, or a low one if you don't (and save some money). A lot of the US ISPs with caps just impose it as a "one size (and one price) fits all."

And why is that? It's not 2005 anymore... a few Australian ISPs offer unlimited plans (TPG, Dodo etc.),

I wont go with TPG or Dodo because I want a service that works properly.

I'm with the Node, 150 GB for A$70, not a bad deal considering that I dont have to deal with latency issues from too many transparent proxies. I cant go through 150 GB a month, I dont see what the OP is whinging about.

True, but you have to remember that Australia is MUCH more urbanised than the US. 90%+of us live in the 8 main capital cities, whereas in the US a much greater proportion live in small towns or what we would call 'regional cities'. So measured by the proportion of the population, Australia doesn't have as big a problem as the US in that regard. (Also don't know why you threw Tasmania in there... Hobart at least has the same non-Telstra DSLAM options as the other capitals. In fact I think Darwin is worse of

Every single person, taking a full copy from the source? No caching servers? No multi-cast slots? - Imagine if a movie aired every 15 minutes - but via a protocol which handled multicasting, sure it's not on demand but the decrease in traffic would be enourmous.

I'm in Australia - with 200gb per month, I simply can't afford to stream everything, it's not an option.

I didn't say I don't stream, my point is I don't stream the majority of my media, because it's too restrictive. Regardless, my point is there's a lot of duplication and in-efficiency in how things are currently configured on the internet in general and most streaming sites.

Not being able to configure the pre-buffer in flash for a start is a joke.

The reason traffic is expensive in places like Australia is that most of it has to travel some very long and expensive underwater fiber optic cables to the rest of the world, the kind those who want to build a mesh Internet 2.0 like to forget. Put up an Australian server, do some IP magic to redirect them to that server and the bandwidth wouldn't really cost them much at all. Honestly, without copyright we could set up some extremely much more efficient distribution methods than today, enough to do TV over

Seriously;)I have a spotify and lovefilm account that cost me under $30 a month in total for live streaming of paid content - with a vast collection of content at my fingertips.I have youtube, lastfm, bbc iplayer and many more for free content.I have itunes, youtube movies, lovefilm ppv for all my streaming one-off's that cost me nothing to maintain - but are there and cost something like $5 to stream .

I have a bt infinity connection that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.I know that a lot of this stuff will be unavailable to a lot of people and you will stream illegally in lower quality because the services are unavailable or too expensive.

My point is:To all the naysayers: streaming is now viable.

Yet I still end up buying hardcopies/blueray/dvd's/mp3's to enjoy in the highest quality on an ipod/hdtv when I consider it worth my money.And yes, I mean Firefly and LOTR on awesomely-beautiful HD as well - I am a bit of a movie buff, and most likely am willing to spend more on this stuff then the average person, but then again - this is/....

I had a 1 year subscription to Pandora, and last month, I switched to Spotify. I found Pandora's rotations to be too limited for a given radio station. With Spotify, you can listen to whole albums and actually choose what you'll listen to. It has a related artist radio function, just like Pandora, and if you pay the $10/month subscription, you can download all of these tracks to portable devices like iPods--up to ~3300 or so tracks offline at a time. Now, instead of buying a few CDs (which I may or may not like), I'll just download them to my iPod with my Spotify premium subscription. Their collection has only been limiting in very few cases for me.

note: I'm not affiliated with Spotify. I'm just very happy with the switch, and I think more people would do online streaming--whether video or audio--if they had access to vast collections of media and the ability to watch or listen offline.

I use spotify for almost all my music listening. I don't even bother with offline playlists, I generally just stream music on my mobile when I'm on the go. It's great being able to access such a vast library on the go - when someone is talking about a new track I can bring it up immediately, even if it's an artist I've never heard of.

I haven't paid for music for years, and now I'm spending $10 every month.

99.9% of my music was purchased on CDs (there's a couple of tracks from iTunes and Amazon's MP3 store).

CDs get immediately get ripped, in FLAC format, and copied to the media server. There is a parallel directory structure with all the music transcoded to MP3.

My media center computer in the living room (which is connected to the stereo) streams the FLAC from the server.

My phone streams the MP3 versions using Subsonic.

I have a small amount of SACD/DVD-A - those get played directly without streaming. Frankly I wish I had more of them. That's the worst thing about the "MP3 Revolution" - it killed the high-quality multichannel formats.

I stream probably 3% of the entertainment (If measuring by time spent). But of the entertainment products* that I consume I download 100%. I don't buy DVDs or CDs. Or books. How do you stream a book? I don't watch TV in the sense that I watch shows broadcast over the air, cable, or satellite, and I don't listen to the radio.

So I don't stream my entertainment, aside from an occasional live v-cast. But I do rely almost exclusively on the internet for it.

I moved to a place that only has a 1/2 meg up and down DSL so I have definitely reduced my streaming from when I had Comcast. Nevertheless, I am still hovering around 80% while I use to be 99.5% of streaming media.

- Most of the video I watch is streamed via Netflix or Plex - the Plex video I own, but it's "streaming" from my video server to my television's client.

- With audio, it depends. I listen to podcasts a lot more than I listen to music nowadays - so the file ends up on my device before I listen to it, but I obviously have to download it over the internet (which I realize isn't streaming). If the question is simply whether I'm using a service like Pandora for my audio, the answer is almost never.

YouTube is useful for finding video clips and favourite songs to share, but other than that, I download.torrents. Voraciously. As I'm allowed to under CANADIAN law for previewing/prelistening purposes before making purchase decisions.

Very occasionally, I'll listen to music stored locally on my home desktop, but that usually interferes with the entertainment choices of the other members of my household in a shared space. I more often listen to my music collection on my smartphone via streaming from Google Music; alternately, I listen to "radio" from Last.FM, which by this point knows my tastes better than I do. I was worried about bandwidth usage for a while, but it turns out to be less than 1 GB per month for me.

I think a number of people forgot LastFM, YouTube, AccuRadio, MySpace, ViMeo are all streaming online. It's slashdot; so, in theory, they shouldn't have forgotten that...oh, you know what, it's slashdot, downloading from a peer network and overseas servers isn't technically streaming...yeah, nevermind; I got it now.

You sir should be a politician. You see that the results don't match your expectation so it must be the fault of the people responding.

I very rarely stream my entertainment. I buy music I want to listen to, old fashioned I know, and use my PVR for the shows I want to watch. The only exception to this are occasional dips into the BBC iPlayer when I forget to record something, or picking up NFL games that aren't broadcast in the UK. So 0-20% is a good fit for me.

Don't live in the boonies. I mean it. If you live in the boonies, get the hell out of there and move to even a small town. You don't want to rely on satellite internet with it's draconian 550mb a day malarkey. I watch two videos of any size on youtoobs and They cut my bandwidth to dialup speeds.

I don't really listen to music but since the poll mentioned video I had to put 90%. We got rid of cable and just use the net connection for most everything (and occasionally the antenna). Netflix does a lot but for the most recent stuff we'll use nbc.com/comedycentral.com/etc.

I have UVerse so it's either 100% or 0% depending on which way you want to call it. Everything comes in on the phone line then gets routed out at the modem. Is it all online, or is it all offline? I'm so confused.

If the MPAA would get their heads out of their asses I would gladly stream everything I watched and pay 2 to 3 times more than I pay now for Netflix for the privilege. As it is, the selection is too small to take up more than a small percentage of my total viewing time.

Same here. I also listen to stuff on Grooveshark at the office and at work, and I've been watching a lot of stuff on Netflix recently, mostly old TV shows (I find it's a lot easier to carve out 40 some odd minutes for a TV show than 90+ for a movie).

Well, there's two possible interpretations. Either depends upon how you choose to interpret the word "streaming". If you wish to go the pedantic route then everything is streaming that doesn't come from an analog source. The other route which is probably more in spirit with the poll's author interprets streaming to mean "over IP".

Therefore,

Pedantic: those that understand the underlying technology vs. those that don't

I wouldn't count cable as its a broadcast and not using the internet even if it does share the same fibre. I don't stream much content into my home other than youtube, but even then its mostly teaching video's, how to's rather than entertainment as such.

I stream lots of content on my lan but that's because I have gone for a nas with a big drive rather than keeping copies on different machines. Again that doesn't count as it's my streaming services for me rather than using the internet.

If you are a paying customer, Spotify has no adds. Juxtaposed with hulu where I basically pay for the privilege of watching their ads, Spotify seems pretty good. Their local storage feature also allows me to have all my music with me and not go over the data cap.

Yes, I love spotify.

As for your hi-fi love, the human ear can barely discern 192k mp3 from CD quality, and 256k is pretty much beyond the ability of all but the most acoustically inclined.